We live, like trees, in the footsteps of our ancestors – 2025

We live, like trees, in the footsteps of our ancestors, explores a range of artistic practices from Latin America and conceptual frameworks engaging with ecological sensibilities, pedagogies, and knowledge systems that move away from Western-centered and colonial notions of nature. Adopting decolonial, ecocritical, and more-than-human approaches, this book weaves together historical and material conditions and environmental struggles, examining how these come to bear on contemporary Latin American artistic production. Linking neoliberal exploitative economies, extractive practices and the failures of colonial modernity, the publication aims to shed light on alternative ways of understanding nature and interspecies kinships, and to resurface other epistemologies, which critically reflect on the schism between nature and culture.

Featuring contributions by scholars, artists, and curators, the essays in We live, like trees, in the footsteps of our ancestors offer radical visions of the environment, and hence alternative perceptions of the nature-human relationship, standing apart from traditional colonial thinking and challenging conventional ideologies of progress, landscape, and territorial ownership. Exploring the potential of different formats (practice reflective essays, conversations between artists and curators, and critical and scholarly essays), each piece reflects critically on the inextricable relationship between ecological crisis and colonization in

the Global South.